


Halcyon Days

by Dantalionax



Category: Vampyr (Video Game)
Genre: 1908, Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Confessions, Gen, Guard of Priwen - Freeform, Vampire Hunters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 11:00:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20081095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dantalionax/pseuds/Dantalionax
Summary: London, 1908: A younger Geoffrey McCullum and Edgar Swansea, a Priwen brawler and field chaplain mount an assault on a vampire's hideout. Things do not go as planned, and in their retreat, an admission is made.





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> This AU is the spawn of conversations about the argument you can hear between Edgar and Geoffrey through the office door at Pembroke. They sound familiar, like they've known each other for some time. That, combined with the Brotherhood having a much lower profile than the Guard developed into the theory that Edgar could have been in the Guard of Priwen in younger years. He also repelled Jonathan with that cross in the early game, certainly a talent the Guard would make use of
> 
> Then Beauverger got on twitter and peed in those cheerios but this is still a fun setting even if word of god has said no, so welcome, dear reader, to what if Edgar Swansea was a Priwen Chaplain, 10 years before the Spanish flu, before Carl Eldritch's passing...

“The hell are we waitin’.” Geoffrey McCullum spits, puffing away on his cigarette. “I’ve half a mind to set the damn building alight. Smoke the leech out or roast it where it lays.”

“Pray tell, McCullum, what would you say to Eldritch? The leech the Guard’s spent the past half-year hunting has escaped, and London’s burning, again. Geoffrey McCullum’s lack of patience, it does have a nice ring to it in a Mrs O’Leary’s cow sort of way.” Edgar Swansea snapped, nervously running an absent hand through his beard. “Would you put that damn thing out? Leeches have a better nose than most dogs.” Edgar took a swing to try and snatch the cigarette away, but came up with only a handful of empty air.

Geoffrey grinned at him, lopsided, with the cigarette between his teeth. He took another drag before blowing twin jets of smoke through his nose, directly into Edgar’s face.  
“I smoke, Swansea. So does the entire of London, near abouts. I daresay, you, with the hair oils and liniments… If the leech smells one of us, it’s going to be you.” Edgar rolled his eyes and watched Geoffrey take another pull. It drove the cherry right into his bare fingers, causing the larger man to hiss, spit, swear and throw the offending stub into the dirt. “Fuckin’ drunken waste of life’s late.” Geoffrey referred to George Sullivan, an incomprehensible six-fingered Scottish disaster of an explosives expert Priwen had employed. Neither Geoffrey nor Edgar had ever understood two words out of the man and had to take it on faith from the mission plan that Sullivan would be where he was expected to be. As if on queue, they heard a small thump, issuing from within the building. It was so small it barely rustled a few ratty pigeons in the eaves.

It was as good as a starter pistol however, because Geoffrey McCullum was through waiting. He surged forward, charging and bellowing with his shotgun drawn. The door was barely a few rotten planks on a hinge, he twisted to drive one broad shoulder right through it.

Then came the real explosion. Behind him came the sound of Edgar shouting before a burst of pressure with a sharp scrape of heat roared over from the front. Geoffrey tucked his head down under his forearms, exulting in the bright shriek that washed out his hearing and the pelting of shrapnel coming on its heels.

With one long stride he was inside, wreathed with serpentine coils of smoke and coated with the dying cinders of the improvised bomb. Despite the utter disarray the room’s contents were it had fallen silent, in the strange way leech lairs were. They were mockeries of tombs and defiled even the quiet of the grave. Foul, reflecting eyes glinted out of the dust from a corner, and Geoffrey sprung.

He covered the entire room in one great stride before striking into the smoke with the stake on his arm, smiling as it hit home, exulting in the crunch and the noise of wood powering through decay-softened flesh. The momentum of the swing carried him forward, knocking them both down to the ground. The thing thrashed and hissed beneath his mass but it only served to further impale itself, splashing tainted black blood and purulent foulness across Geoffrey’s face. Somehow, he kept from retching and snarled back at the leech, giving the stake one last vicious twist with his full body weight on top of it.

The thrashing calmed and ceased and the leech slackened. Triumph quickly turned to concern when he looked at the inert body and saw it for one of the smaller, weaker varieties. Was that truly all? He could not remember. His stake was stuck fast to the floor and would not budge or retract. The concern turned to fear and outright panic when he heard something moving behind him. Hands trembled, disobeying him as they slipped on the bloodied network lashing the apparatus tight to his arm.

Somehow, he had time to look up as he felt a horrible chilling gust from something moving fast, far too fast, to see the damn thing right in front of him. It swung back a leg and kicked at Geoffrey’s head, but he wasn’t quite so helpless. He wouldn’t be able to dodge it entirely, that much he knew, so he threw himself forward and caught the blow across his chest plate.

The metal sang with the impact that tore the last straps lashed across Geoffrey’s forearm. It sent him tumbling over, onto his back where the voracious leech sprung for its meal. The leech dove in, a blur of spittle and jagged claws coming into a merciful tangle in his overcoat, allowing him to mule-kick it away. Blunted, peeling talons dragged their way through heavy fabric, followed by an angry skittering in the dirt. Geoffrey kicked up with one heel and snatched his boot knife, lunging with the full expectation of plunging the blade into the damn thing’s chest.

The knife did not hit home, or anything in fact, the leech had not moved from the place near the door where the kick had sent it. “The fuck were you waiting for, a monogrammed invitation?” Geoffrey said. Edgar had finally caught up and was brandishing his iron processional cross, much to the dismay of the leech withering away under the sacred force. Geoffrey had only seen him wear this glimmer of authority and command in his eyes in two places - on the field, and over his operating table - and it remained startling as ever compared to his usual softness.

“Back, ye foulness!” Edgar bellowed, from a rare place of thundering resonance. The leech moaned and scrabbled, weakly raking up the dirt with its claws in an attempt to burrow away back into the dank underground, to the foul world of vermin it belonged to. Whatever Chaplains could spew from those staves was as good as sunlight. The skin did not appear to smolder and burn from within, but the leeches caught under the sanctified glare certainly thought it did. Geoffrey raised his shotgun, feeling the stinging soreness where it knocked against the stripped raw patch of his forearm. The dent in his chest plate kept forcing the barrel upwards, pointing over the leech and toward Edgar behind him instead, so he brought one hand behind him to undo one of the straps.

Several things happened, nearly all at once. Edgar glanced at Geoffrey, eyes softening with his doctorly evaluation and mild puzzlement. The leech sprung, twisting in the air between the two men and swung with its foul claws of blood at Edgar and Geoffrey, lacking a better option, fired.

Directly at Edgar, with only a scant hundred pounds of halfway rotted, reanimated flesh there to intercept the pellets. The thing jerked and whorled, each bit of shot making a thump and red spray as it tore a lump of meat off. How many slugs per shell had he loaded? He could not recall, but as the monster fell and Edgar remained looming over it, the thought quickly left his mind.

God he hated shooting indoors. Geoffrey’s ears rang and sung, the cheap rounds spewed a sulphurous, greasy smoke out of the barrel that stung his eyes. The buckshot had done its job, leaving the leech a confusing jumble of disfigured flesh and bone bits on the floorboard. It was revolting, writhing in almost unrecognizable pieces of meat and still trying to suckle blood from its own wrist. Geoffrey stood up, shaking his head in pity as he walked across the room. He put the barrel to the mess of the things head, and pulled the trigger once more.

“Simply done, enough. Think we can still beat Sullivan down to the pub, eh?” Geoffrey said. When no response came, he turned to see Edgar slumped to his staff, wincing and clutching at a dangerous darkening patch at his side, spreading.

Before Geoffrey can speak again, Edgar collapses.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the dialogue in here's from orionali's drabble way back when. Cunt, I'm not sure who came up with the dog at this point.

Edgar’s olive cassock was soaked nearly to black, flapping wetly with his steps. Despite the worry and faint guilt Geoffrey felt worming around in his belly, his mind remained all too alert, rational and calculating. It kept him staring down at the other man’s tracks and appraising them as a hunter would. He saw the uneven way they were placed, the uncertain way they wavered and the blood. The blood he saw most of all, little drips and splashes between smeary bootprints that told him his quarry would not make it much farther. In another time, he would have felt his second wind carry him back into the fray.

Instead, when Edgar’s leg buckled and Geoffrey saw him stumble onto the paving stones, a distant cousin of that rush surged within him and pulled him to the other man’s side. He swung one of Edgar’s arms across his shoulders, and kept hurrying along. Towards the outpost, towards home, and towards help.

“Pneumothorax? Perforated intestine? God, damn those claws! That hovel was filthy, fortunate if it’s just infected! Ah... “ Edgar mumbled, yelping. Geoffrey hoped for a moment that it had been claws, feeling the sting of anxiety nipping inside his breastbone.

“It’s not that bad doc. Knock it off.” Geoffrey snapped, roughly. “This is just hysterics. You’re not going to die, we’re nearly back to the outpost. Lawrence -- “

“Lawrence?! You’re going to leave me to the hands of that haggard butcher? Not on your life or mine, McCullum. I will tend...oh, dear, I feel faint...” Geoffrey snorted at the swooning chaplain, rolling his eyes while he tried to loosen the impressively powerful grip Edgar had still kept clamped on his shoulder.

“My God, be that it only some of what it feels… Septicemia, blood poisoning, they’re dreadful things. Not good, not good at all...” Edgar was rambling, head bobbing, eyelids fluttering and flashing open with the bursts of pain Geoffrey’s motion caused.

"Damn, that leech really got you. Slowing down on me, old man?" Geoffrey said.

"Funny," Edgar hisses as he winced and shoved himself out of Geoffrey’s grasp, leaning and panting on a shop wall before sliding down it to sit against the structure. "I was thinking of retirement, actually. Get a seaside cottage, spend the rest of my days playing cards with some other relics." He clutched at the wound, recoiling from the sloppy wet noise as much as the sensation. "Doubtful that Carl's set up pensions for us, occupational hazards being as they are." 

Geoffrey tried to grab him again, God, they were so close, but Edgar warded him off and shook his head. “Just… I just need a moment to catch my breath.” He said with a wheeze. He’d gone pale and clammy, skin looking greasy and unliving in the guttering gaslight.

“Geoffrey, I’ve a question for you.” Edgar murmured, hazy and faint. “What would you do if I were to turn leech?”

“What kind of fuckin’ question is that, Doc?” Geoffrey spat, with a vicious scowl. He didn’t have time for this nonsense ever, much less from a man bleeding out in front of him.

“You should never question your elders, son. Humor me.” Geoffrey would have blown it off, assumed it was another bizarre and utterly pointless query but there was something strange and genuine in Edgar’s voice, beneath the pain. Geoffrey sighed, and quietly placed a hand on his shoulder, trying to look him in the eye.

“Edgar, you’ve pulled my stones out the fire more times than I care to admit. Half the damn Guard owes you at this point, in some way. Though I value you as a brother, that does not buy you leniency if… that, were somehow to happen.” Edgar glanced up at him, with a strange smile and a bitter laugh.

“Always to eradicate abominations...” He said. Geoffrey removed his hand, folded his arms and stood up as straight and tall as he could through the dented armor plate and aches of his bruises.  
“The Guard of Priwen does not collaborate with leeches.” Eldritch’s old standby phrase, it had never sounded right in Geoffrey’s voice before, and it certainly didn’t now. Edgar nodded, sadly, and tried to stand up tall before collapsing onto Geoffrey.

They hurried along for a bit in near silence. Even the whimpers and yelps from Geoffrey jostling him around had ceased, cutting the clamor of activity down to nothing but Geoffrey’s own heavy breathing and stomping footfalls on the road. 

“An hour, Edgar. I’d give you an hour. Nothing more.” Geoffrey whispers. He hadn’t intended for Edgar to hear him but the rising hoot and bizarre snort that issued from the injured man told him he had been detected. “Don’t get too excited. Not for you. For Cunt. I owe you for him. How long did Carl have you peeling potatoes for that? A month? Two?” 

“That shaggy hound?” Edgar laughed weakly before being overtaken by a feeble fit of dry coughs. “It was three months. Still have the scars to show for it. Dull instruments… much more dangerous than sharp ones. Hah, a shame those claws weren’t sharper...” Edgar looked at his gloved hand for a moment, then gazed over at Geoffrey and smiled. "I can see why Eldritch named you his protege. The same dedication… but with compassion and flexibility he lacks himself. A worthy successor..." Edgar trailed off, back to silence. Geoffrey was relieved for a moment but quickly moved to fear and panic when he felt Edgar’s grip on his shoulder loosen and fall away.

“Swansea. Hey!” Edgar had gone limp. Geoffrey grabbed a fistful of bloodied and dirt-smeared to keep him from collapsing to the pavement. He jostled and shook the unconscious man to no reply. “Edgar?” He pressed a hand about his jaw, fingers searching for a pulse at his throat that didn’t seem to be there. “Shit.” Geoffrey spat, groaning as he hefted his fallen friend's body over his shoulders like a flour sack. His walk turned into a trot, then a full run. 

Hopefully, there was still time left he could save.


	3. Chapter 3

Despite Edgar’s trepidation, David Lawrence was a competent, but utterly ancient physician from the early days of the Guard of Priwen. Supposedly he had been plucked from a Crimean War battlefield by Kendall Stone himself, but the tale would change nearly every time Lawrence told it. His stories of Carl’s hellion days and the Great Hunt went uncontested simply because he was the only one from that era that still remained. The only constant, it seemed, was the man’s own quiet voice telling the story. Even the accent would drift away from the Londoner’s he had assimilated to something faintly Irish as he spoke.The man had bushy eyebrows, set over a pair of gentle blue eyes, somehow always managing to seem older than his face. Usually, he had sidewhiskers that would occasionally grow into an unkempt beard. Despite his age, and the stress and worry from Geoffrey’s antics over the years, he remained gray, hair only whitening fully at his chin.  
The man’s practices were not without flaws. Edgar’s fastidiousness required pressure cookers and chemicals Geoffrey couldn’t even spell but still frequently found himself tasked to obtain. Meanwhile, Lawrence was content to continue soaking everything in his demesne with gallons and gallons of carbolic acid, usually while reciting something about Joseph Lister. If infection set in anyways, he’d deal with it then. Rationally, Edgar was the far more effective doctor, but Lawrence remained the only practitioner that could get near Geoffrey while he was still conscious.

Geoffrey threw open the door to the Whitechapel outpost so hard the glass panes in the windows shook. The door guard, whoever it was, barely had time to rouse from their nap and catch the last flaps of Geoffrey’s coat as he ducked through a ragged curtain covering for a missing door.

The building they had set up in had been a gentlemen’s supper club at one point. After a fire, a bombing or something, nobody was sure what, it had been left to rot and picked clean of whatever could be carried out. The billiards room had been converted into a field hospital. A bar on one end had been re-purposed into a lab bench, stocked as a rather impressive druggery for only 10 men. In the center stood the denuded remains of the billiards table, stripped away to a scuffed slate surface with stains visible as an oily sheen in the light from the electric lamp. It was one bit of Edgar’s modernity Lawrence had welcomed, glad to be free of spitting gas lamps and greasy oil smoke. The man himself was “resting his eyes” again by the potbelly stove. Geoffrey had stormed in with such a vengeance, it was remarkable he hadn’t been roused like the doorman. Anxiety was starting to infest Geoffrey, he tried to steady himself but simply dropped Edgar onto the table with a heavy thud. He was ready to bluster and bellow for assistant when he saw a nurse had come creeping in. She was new, a small, pestilent looking creature with mousy hair and perpetually skittering bony fingers, Geoffrey knew, they had not been introduced. She balked and yelped at the bloody sight before her, gasping.

  
“Oh! Oh no… Oh! Doctor…?” She squeaked. It worked like it was a magical incantation; Lawrence perked up immediately surveying the situation and springing to the table with borderline leech speed.

“Jesus, Geoffrey, what have you and Doctor Swansea done now?” He said, prodding at Edgar’s face, trying to get a response past the groans and moans, snapping down an eyelid and shaking his head before wheeling around to the young woman. “Nurse, in my office, the red leather case, gauze, the blood kit.” He paused and looked at Geoffrey for a moment. “And the small round tin off my desk.” She didn’t move, rooted in gasping horror. “Go, Go! Dammit, he’s not dead but he may yet be, run!” Lawrence rarely yelled, so when he did, those around him tended to listen. She didn’t need a third reminder, and hitched up her skirts and bolted away. Geoffrey knew what the blood kit would entail, far too well for his liking. Every human he’d ever met bled the same stuff. According to Edgar, his was apparently exceptional in some way, from all the hours he’d seen Edgar excitedly wagging and waving vials of the purloined stuff at Doctor Lawrence. ‘It’s incredible, not a clot in sight! A fourth group!’, he has said in glee. Whenever an injured man had needed blood since it had been Geoffrey’s they received and this was not looking to be any exception.  
For the small experimental draws, Geoffrey would grumble and groan, only because he had found Edgar was willing to provide a little incentive if pushed. Vials of blood for flasks of brandy. It was the good stuff too, Geoffrey had no idea where Edgar got it from but certainly wasn’t going to question his good providence. God, he still hated the damn needle though. The nurse had returned with a tray of supplies and he eyed the sparkling stinger of metal dangling off the tube feeling his mouth dry out. As he removed his coat and armor to roll up a sleeve he kept staring it down, like it was a viper waiting to strike at him or slither back into hiding the moment he looked away.  
Lawrence returned to the table with a frame of wire wrapped in gauze in one hand and a brown bottle in the other, gesturing with his head to a threadbare and half collapsed sofa. Geoffrey backed over to it, unable to tear his eyes from the damn blood kit and sat down.  
Whether it was the coldness of the metal or the scent of the chemicals, when Lawrence placed the mask over Edgar’s face Geoffrey saw his whole body go rigid and eyes fly open in sickening fear, quivering and darting around the room like a deer stepping on dry brush. He stayed wild eyed, managing to struggle and thrash his head around so ferociously that the gauze interlocking with the man’s beard was no longer enough to hold the mask in place, forcing Lawrence to steady it in between dribbling doses from the small bottle. Geoffrey couldn’t be certain, but Edgar seemed to surrender to the fumes and fall away into the strange chemical slumber while staring directly at him.  
Geoffrey would have rather been subject to an actual vermin’s ministrations, warily eyeing the nurse jabbing away at the delicate skin on the crook of his arm before soaking it with alcohol and scrubbing so vigorously he expected the rag to come away bloodied. For all his pride and bravado, he still flinched and shied away when she moved away to grab the vacuum jar. The large bore needle glinted with a kind of synthetic viciousness far afield from any feral skal or blood-crazed ekon that Geoffrey had never been able to immunize himself against. Lawrence caught the nurse’s obvious eye roll and glared at her.

“I’ll take care of that, if it’s so onerous.” She looked ready to spit a venomous comment, but Lawrence held up a hand and headed it off. “Martha, I’ve seen better bedside manner in army tent hospitals. You can be as callous as you please with an unconscious patient! I’ve even set the inhaler up, a child of three could maintain the vacuum.” Looking like a dog caught head first in the garbage, cowed and crouched, she exchanged places with Lawrence, hands pumping the netted latex bulbs as calmly as if she were applying perfume for a theater date instead of chemically drowning a mauling victim.

Even with Lawrence’s more capable hands tapping about on his arm Geoffrey had gone white knuckled. One hand on the chair and the other gripping his hip flask hard enough to make the metal creak. He went for a fortifying sip, preparing for the godawful pinch and unnatural pressure. Lawrence did not follow up and instead held out the round tin, making a little rattle as he removed the lid.

“Nectar drop, lad? Surely better than that tepid rotgut.” Lawrence popped one of the amber candies into his own mouth and Geoffrey followed in kind after a quick glance at the nurse to be sure she was none the wiser. God, Lawrence was right. Geoffrey’s body heat had turned the untenable mixture of spirits into something truly monstrous. He would have gladly accepted the candy even under the eyes of Carl, God and every childhood crush to get this damn aftertaste out of his mouth. A strange, wet spattering noise caught Geoffrey’s ear, he looked down to lay eyes on the origin. Lawrence held up his palms and chuckled quietly. Geoffrey hadn’t even noticed the needle stick, the old man was still devilishly fast when he was out of sight. He checked the vacuum jar on the floor; satisfied with what he saw, he clapped Geoffrey on the shoulder in reassurance before rising and returning to the operating table, such as it was.

  
Sitting idle felt wrong beyond wrong. Geoffrey clenched and relaxed his hand, then shuddered as he felt the warmth of his own blood slithering away down the tube. Not only was he stuck watching, he didn’t even have a particularly good viewpoint to watch from. Lawrence was mumbling and prodding about, occasionally flashing a glinting tool or his red-tipped fingers above where Geoffrey could see. The nurse stood, bent over Edgar’s head, seemingly determined to make amends for her earlier transgressions. One foot was tapping, keeping time like any bar musician, keeping the mask soaked and watching Lawrence’s movements keenly.

Geoffrey took another pull from his flask and winced. The transition from body-temperature to room temperature had somehow made it even worse. What had he topped this thing off with, kerosene? It stung in his mouth and he could feel it fighting with his stomach contents, bludgeoning its way through the half-digested meat and potatoes like a fat man barreling through a crowd. It was brutal and nauseating, but was finally having the desired effect. Sooner than he had expected, but he supposed he owed that fortune to the blood he could still hear dripping away into the jar.  
He took another sip. This time, he coughed, half expecting to see a plume of noxious smoke spewing out before him. The nurse glared at him and strode across the room. Either the vacuum flask had finished its job or she had simply noticed what he was doing and did not want any of it to wind up in the sample. She was not as fast as Lawrence, but her actions still seemed to blur together to Geoffrey. One moment the needle was still in his arm, guzzling away, and the next, she was back at the operating table with the filled jar in hand, leaving behind no evidence but a neat spiral of gauze dotted red in the center.

It was a strange, deeper ache the kit left Geoffrey with. Bruises and bites, no matter how severe, were damage done from the outside inward. This unnerving assembly, however forward it was in the scientific respect was a leap backwards for the Guard. It was an artificial leech. All their work trying to eradicate them from England for Swansea to walk in and create mechanical ones to replace them. Geoffrey stood up and saw spots for a moment, trying to twist and massage away the stiffness lingering in his elbow. He walked in a dizzy haze to the table, and what he saw made his stomach whirl in revolt.

  
Meat. It all looked like meat, the same as in the icebox in the kitchen. Yellowed fat, silvery membrane, sinew, red muscle. But just above the gash Geoffrey could see the rise and fall of Edgar’s breathing. Back in the wound he saw a vein pulsating steadily before being hidden under seeping blood that turned everything monochrome red. Geoffrey had moved in closer, leaning in, putting his hands on the table. One fell across Edgar’s hand. Unnaturally, he did not react, but the hand was soft, warm and entirely unremarkable otherwise. Focusing on this detail, it was easy for Geoffrey to convince himself that all was well. There was nothing synthetic about the man’s slumber and there wasn’t a butcher’s shop disaster lurking just out of view. His delusion came to a crashing halt when Lawrence bumped into Geoffrey as he returned to continue the procedure. The old doctor sighed when he saw Geoffrey’s hand. Gentle and slow, he picked it up and pushed him back a step from the table.

“Son, there’s nothing more for you to do here. Report to Eldritch and for all that’s holy get some rest. I don’t want to see you active until tomorrow night, I can order it medically and will. But I would rather not anger the old wolf needlessly.” Lawrence said, cocking his head sympathetically. It was all beyond Geoffrey and looked quite hopeless. From the plate of savage-looking hooks and knives, the nurse steadily squeezing the bulb on the inhaler jar and gently rocking the slowly draining blood jar. Greedy black clots, swarming like leeches, swirled away from their roost on the uptake. She still managed to shoot him another foul glare, repelling him from the room as effective as any other gesture.

He realized, then, that he had nothing else to do down here. This meant that there was no further reason available to him to delay the final task of the night. Geoffrey looked out to the hallway, to the yawning black void of the staircase upward, and then back to the table. Lawrence and the nurse had their backs to him now, fully involved in their actions in near silence. The occasional shear of metal-on-metal, snap of fiber, or half-mumbled word Geoffrey wouldn’t have recognized anyways breached the quiet. He knew he was invisible to them now, more or less, and still thought he felt Lawrence glaring at him as he took another drink while standing halfway out of the room like he was completely gutless.

With Carl Eldritch awaiting him upstairs, he was. The man would have a pipe of the good tobacco before turning in, and on most nights, that was also when Geoffrey would give his daily report. Most days, it was simple, and more tedious than anything. Some days, Carl would even be in a good mood, and would hand him a crystal glass of scotch as he spoke. It could fool an onlooker into thinking Carl truly had nothing but Geoffrey’s best interests at heart. They would laugh, Carl wedging in bad jokes that could manage to get worse and worse as the night wore on. Bad days, though, there were bad days, and Geoffrey never felt like he could truly predict when they came. Being late, that was already counting against him, since there was no tell-tale smell of pipe smoke lurking in the air. As mercurial as his moods were, as quickly as he could go from listening half-asleep to lacing into Geoffrey on some perceived inconsistency, he had never raised his voice. Nor would he accept such vulgarity from Geoffrey, telling him, “Volume is the method of brutes and savages, it is not acceptable from civilized men”. Leeches, after all, had centuries to reign in their temper and become quite eloquent speakers, and those were the most dangerous ones of all. Carl was a master at this. Geoffrey had only heard him shout one time. That… That was a bad day. The worst day, maybe, with Kane, and Morrow, and Lawrence…

  
The flask was at his mouth again, drowning out the bad taste of the memory with a physical bad taste. He shook his head to fully rid himself of both and glanced to the stairwell.  
Did a light go on upstairs? It did not matter. The staircase was no longer some hallway hellmouth. It had become mundane again.

Fear soundly banished, he finally left. He would finish with Carl quickly, and then this long, long, night would be officially over.


	4. Chapter 4

For the second time that night, a door in the outpost slammed shut hard enough to shake glass in the entire structure.

Carl didn’t know what he was talking about. He couldn’t possibly know. He hadn’t been there, he hadn’t been in the field since the Great Hunt.

Carl couldn’t know Geoffrey had charged into the lair looking for blood. He couldn’t know the buckshot Lawrence was likely pulling from Edgar had come from Geoffrey’s gun. 

He couldn’t know any of these things because Geoffrey had not told him. The disgrace of bringing back an injured man had been enough. “You’re not fool enough to think Lawrence immortal, then what will you do? Priwen was lucky to recruit a man of Dr. Swansea’s skills and you nearly squandered that.” Carl had said.

Hounds, Geoffrey recalled, could smell a man’s fear. Could wolves? The old wolf on the other side of the desk seemed to. He had stayed straight and tall, and tried to stare the man down through the cigarette smoke, but once Carl had sensed the faintest mote of blood the trap was sprung. It was another attack to round out the night, tearing into his mind with words.

He found, as he sat on the top of the staircase with his head in his hands, that he still drastically preferred being clawed at by leeches. The tongue lashing had him riddled with doubt, earlier bravado subsumed by worries. Edgar’s current state was his fault, that much Geoffrey had known walking into the office. He also knew Edgar had chosen to go into the field, acutely aware of the risks involved. Geoffrey had not lied, he had not even dared to hold any information back. When he was unsure what had happened, he had admitted it. That was his failing. “Ignorance is the shield of a lesser man”, Carl had told him years ago. It was certainly one Eldritch never needed. In his twilight years, the man could pass for omniscient.

Still, had he known what would happen, Geoffrey would have exchanged places with the other man. He would be the one laid out on the slate with Dr. Lawrence - or, more likely (and more unpleasant) Edgar himself slowly working the pieces back together. The thought alone was nauseating, but did not change his desires.

That had to exonerate him. Right? Despite Eldritch’s what-ifs, Edgar was still alive. Unless the old wolf knew yet another thing Geoffrey did not... His hands were shaking when he looked at them again. One hand went to his flask, the other drawing a cigarette and matchbook from his coat pocket. He had intended to take a small sip, just to mute some of this wretched night, but it quickly turned into guzzling, only stopped by the back flow sealing his lip over the spout. When he pulled it away, there was a small streak of blood coiling down the threading.

This night was cursed. His hands steadied, he lit the cigarette and stood back up. Rationally, Geoffrey knew he should go right back to the barracks and curl up on his bed. 

Rationally, he knew that were he to do that, he would end up tossing and turning in discomfort and worry, waiting for sleep to claim him for hours. He would then give up relying on nature, and walk to the infirmary for a sedative.

Clearly, since he was going to wind up there anyways, it was only logical that he stopped in now and saved himself the trip.

He tackled the stairs, a little unsteady this time from fatigue (obviously) and emerged back into a dreadful scene. It was empty and dark, save for the electric bulb’s glimmer on the wet slate. He was fixated, gobsmacked, and more than a little horrified at the sight. 

Then his eyes adjusted and he saw the whole room again. The nurse really was gone, while Lawrence was back in his place dozing by the stove, next to a motionless form on a cot, draped over with a Hudson Bay blanket. Carl’s foreshadowing put a dreadful burst of ice in Geoffrey’s blood before he got control of himself enough to notice the slight rise-and-fall of breathing distorting the colored stripes in the wool.

He had still managed to cross most of the room in the meantime. Geoffrey thought he was being reasonably silent, creeping over on the balls of his feet, but the incredulous glare he met from Lawrence indicated otherwise. The old man scowled when he saw the cigarette in Geoffrey’s hand and snatched it from him.

“The hell did you start smoking? You’re too young for this.” He spat, taking a puff before crushing the remnant under his heel. “Didn’t I tell you to go to bed? What are you doing back here?” Lawrence read the worry digging furrows in Geoffrey’s face, and stood up, clapping him about the shoulders.

There was no really dominant wording, no authoritative tone Geoffrey could take with these fears. He couldn’t even meet Lawrence’s eyes for long as he spoke. “Swansea, uh… He’s not. I didn’t... well, is the gunshot… is there going to be permanent…”

“Gunshot? Son, I don’t know what you think happened, but that was a laceration injury. A serious one, perhaps, but I know gunshot wounds better than I should and that was not one.” He pulled up the blanket a little and gestured with a nod, exposing his handiwork in the form of a gauze-wrapped stripe of foil on the man’s hip. Edgar would have been horrified at the acrid dressing had he been aware of it. Instead, he was compliant, still sleeping off the procedure.

Lawrence dropped the blanket and looked back at Geoffrey. “Aye, he’ll live. Well and long, too, without any more field mishaps. Perhaps a limp, perhaps a cane...but yes, we’re through the worst.” He gave him another pat, and returned to his chair.

It all lifted a physical weight from Geoffrey. All the doubt Carl had tried so hard to weave into him dissolved with Lawrence’s assurance. Geoffrey felt his head throb and spin a little in the wake of the realization. A woman might have swooned, and a lesser man would have jumped in elation and relief. 

No, Geoffrey was not a woman, or a lesser man. He was Carl Eldritch’s son, the heir to Kendall Stone’s Guard of Priwen. He was a proud hunter, returned successful with another nest of leeches to his name. He was the fearless vanguard, barreling into danger first and leaving it last. He was the field commander the rookies aspired to be, or at least be teamed with, adapting to the uncertain world and unpredictable foes, while still managing to bring his charges home alive.

He was all this, and still a man, and a bit of a drunk one at present. He was sore and exhausted. He needed a piss. He wanted a smoke. In the disused garden behind the outpost he would accomplish both. 

The sun was rising, and the night was finally over.


End file.
